The top 10 states with the most pollution, in rough order and with rough estimates from the 8/18/14 reports to the EPA of 2013 Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Large Faciliities, are

Texas, 410M tons

Indiana, 150M tons

Pennsylvania, 148M tons

Illinois, 140M tons

Louisiana, 138M tons

Ohio, 136M tons

Florida, 125M tons

California, 110M tons

Kentucky, 108M tons

Alabama, 101M tons

California is the only one of the top top states to charge polluters. Washington State only has 25 tons of pollution! And if that program goes through, they on track to raise a billion dollars from charging the market price for carbon pollution.

What an opportunity for these other 9 states!

The people in those states have more fuel, so to speak, for a successful marketplace for a price for pollution, because there's so much more of it. They're leaving lots of money on the table today (Texas could have an annual $4 billion program at $10/ton). And it's so much better to tax pollution than, say, sales of food or income.

Another way to look at this chart is how much we're currently subsidizing polluters (at $10/ton to make the math easy) by not charging them anything for their pollution, by state. And another way of saying the same thing is how much more of a tax burden we're putting on families in each of these states because they are forced to make up for the lack of pollution fees that the polluters aren't contributing to the public sector.

It may be perverse, but all this pollution creates a great opportunity for better policy!

Polluters get a free ride now; some states making them pay for their climate mess

In most places, an oil refinery or a massive manufacturing plant that creates tens of thousands of metric tons of carbon pollution doesn't have to pay for that pollution. Since it's free to the company, they keep on spewing out the climate change causing carbon like dumping toxic sludge directly into a sewer: no filters, no caps, no nothing.

Illinois should do the same thing. If we charged our oil refineries and major manufacturers a fair price for their pollution, we'd not only quit subsidizing our polluters but we'd be able to help pay for the backbone of our low-pollution economy: the CTA and Metra. These trains carry 2 million people every day but the backlog for maintenance is far larger than what we're budgeted to pay for. Makes sense to pay for the maintenance (and expansion) of low-pollution public transportation by finally kicking the polluters off the free ride bus.

If Washington State could generate a billion and we're about twice their size....we might be able to solve our transit funding shortfalls in an elegant policy combination.